The Thought Experiment and the Representation of Science in Renaissance Utopian Literature (original) (raw)
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Revisiting La città del sole in light of recent scholarship on Campanella’s naturalism and with recourse to key works of his philosophy, I examine how his utopia systematically re-writes Plato’s ideal city from the Republic by simultaneously drawing on and naturalizing a set of key Platonic figures. This transformation serves as an implicit response to criticisms of the utopian project made by Aristotle and Machiavelli; it is also a means of taking distance from the hermetic impulse at work in much of Renaissance Neoplatonism. The City of the Sun can thus be seen as replicating Kallipolis’ rigid order and its connection to absolute truth but simultaneously grounding that order in an empirical naturalism that allows the ideal society to become open.
Utopia and Utopias: a Study on a Literary Genre in Antiquity
Ancient narrative, 2006
This study aims to analize utopia as a literary genre in post-classical Greek literature. In Part I we have defined the concepts of utopia and utopianism. In Part II we have established the main features and topoi of utopia. As a literary genre, we define utopia as a fictional and intrinsically dialectic entity, which holds anthitectical elements: on one side, rationalism, on the other a mythical and poetic vision of the world. Part III is dedicated to the analysis of the two fictional texts which are traditionally considered utopian (Euhemerus’ and Iambulus’ accounts as described by Diodorus Siculus), as well as the description of Meroe in Heliodorus’ Aethiopica. Our aim is to ascertain to what extent they fit into the general normative presuppositions that define utopia’s literary model. Through the comparison of the above mentioned texts, we conclude that utopian literature illustrates the duality inherent to the human nature, which is akin to imagination and reason, dream and re...
Education is considered one of the basic pillars in ensuring the stability and harmony of the state. The purpose of our study is to find modern elements of education in utopian writings. Thus we used the contrastive analysis for utopian works from the Greek Antiquity (Plato) and the Italian Renaissance (Doni, Patrizi, Agostini, Zuccolo, and Campanella). The study of the content of the utopian works has led to the identification of innovative ideas such as: enrollment in an educational system, the state as an organizer of education, non-discriminatory educational system, physical and art education; specialized trainers. We can conclude that even nowadays the study of utopian works is a source of innovative ideas on improving education in present and future societies.
Rhetoric as Utopia and Utopia as Rhetoric in 16 th -17 th -Century Literary Culture
Among the great number of ways of proposing innovations and speaking about them, utopia is one of the most interesting, because of its borderline status between fiction and a project to be carried out. This characteristic of utopia was of key importance for Renaissance and Baroque, because these cultures would highly appreciate text as a cognitive tool. Enchantment by text, translation practices, reading and writing brought humanists to the interpretation of verbal creativity as, in a way, making a world of your own. This interpretation made scholars wonder, whether the utopias of 16 th-17 th centuries were projects intended for implementation, or just a kind of literary play, tightly intertwined with humanists' writing activity and their interest in antiquity and reconstruction or 'deconstruction' of it [Hexter 1973; Skinner 2014]. The latter theory is often counterposed to Marxist interpretations of utopian literature by T. More, A.F. Doni, T. Campanella etc. as predecessors of utopian socialism and commune-building; focussing on the literary character of renaissance utopias, this theory rejects anachronistic readings and appeals to the historical context and its specifics. Here I am going to show that these very specifics make utopian texts of early modern era meaningful for contemporary political philosophy (not Marxist, anyway) and for intellectual history, which involves considering topicality of historical sources for contemporary humanitarian studies and theories [LaCapra 1983]. The key factor of this importance is the function of text in the intellectual culture of 16 th-17 th centuries. This function and the way it worked within the topics of utopia reveals the significance of both of them for the principle of hope by E. Bloch, for the implications of allegory in theories by W. Benjamin and G. Deleuze, for the aesthetical politics and the sublime experience by F. Ankersmit. Generally speaking, the aim of this paper is to suggest the ways for elaborating, by exploration of Renaissance and Baroque utopian discourses, the links between political philosophy and the linguistic turn.
Back to the Sense of The City", 2016
The most important aim of the "Back to the Sense of the City" International Conference is to draw attention to the city and the sense of its being, the fact that a city seen as a heterogeneous entity is not only a work of its direct creators: architects, engineers, civil servants and municipal services, but all who "fill" it, primarily its inhabitants. A particular role is attributed to artists. It is the artists’ duty not only to shape it but also creatively criticize and contemplate. Artistic actions understood as the city’s activity and activity in relation to the city have certain qualities of utopian events, manifesting in the unattainability of a goal, idealistic activity base, transience of events and the type of references to it /to the city/ . The paper focuses on such interpretative approach to these actions. The meaning of this notion is usually interpreted as a place that does not exist, "... from the Greek outopos (gr. ou - no, topos - a place, non-place , place that does not exist, non-existent) and the eutopia (good place) ". Our statement, built on an idea of an internal dialogue, a dialogue between the main text and the footnotes and quotations, focuses on the changing of the ways of thinking about the city as a work of active art, on the role of an artist, architect, town-planner in this process and their activities seen as special intellectual contribution to the development of this kind of space. It is also a kind of provocation relating to the description of similarities of the artistic and architectural activities in the context of the space of a city.
Morus (English translation, originally in Portuguese), 2008
This work intends to present Plato’s Republic as an ancient source of the utopian tradition,not only for its project to found a just city in speech, but also for its project to justify the legitimacy of this literary/philosophical genre mostly through considerations about the possibility of this political form. The thread to guide us is the platonic usage of the concept of dunamis (power) and its cognate adjective (dunaton) through two central axes: i) The argument that what is being drawn with this speech that founds cities – which despite of the anachronism we will call utopian – is a structure of political power based on the human power to prevent mistakes through knowledge. If this is not a really infallible power, this does not undermine revoke the capacity of speech to unveil the consequences that would follow from this hypothesis. ii) It is stated in the text that the just city there built does not exist, did not exist and will not exist, but lies like a model for anyone who would take it as a reference for one’s own actions. This point indicates a carving of the ordinary sense of “possible”, which no longer refers to the practical effectiveness of a whole system, but now denotes a properly metaphysical reference that can be accomplished in different degrees. In the intersection of these two lines of inquiry lies the definition of the genre of philosophy, understood as a speech that longs for immunity from the making of mistakes even if aware of its impossibility. In this scenario, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Republic inaugurates a discursive project defined as philosophy which will function like a pattern for the utopian genre that will be developed later on. Key words: Republic, Plato, dunamis, dunaton
The Politics and Aesthetics of Utopian Literature: From the “Golden Age” Myth to the Renaissance
Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature, 2023
From its earliest beginnings in the Western world to the end of the Renaissance, utopian literature has developed in four primary ways: as myth about the blissful but vanished past of humanity; as prophecy about a future state of bliss, particularly in millennial visions of the post-apocalyptic kingdom of God; as explicitly posited philosophical and rationalist speculation on how an ideal or at least plausibly better city and society could be attained; and as full-blown fiction, which deploys a range of fictional speech acts. Though in certain ways its ideational origins lie in a rich interplay of topoi derived from mythic antiquity and from the Hellenistic, Roman, and early Christian cultural world, utopian literature in its most formally complex form—that of the utopian fiction—only arises in the Renaissance. In this form, which will ultimately yield the utopian novel of the 19th century, the literary utopia occupies an idiosyncratic position between realism and fantasy fiction, lacking grounding in verisimilar space or time, but also eschewing the ahistoricism and escapism of fantasy. Utopian literature has been mostly understood in terms of moral and sociological functions, ranging from its utility as an instrument of anticipation, or at least fertile speculation about the possible and desirable, to its ability to posit norms and regulatory ideals or, more negatively, its penchant for dogmatism and the abstractions of blueprint and method. A different picture emerges, however, if one considers utopias from the standpoint of how they produce social meaning—an approach that foregrounds the role of textual and semiotic factors without making ethical assumptions about the better or worse character of utopian textual worlds. At stake, rather, is the grasp of utopian literature in terms of an organizational imaginary, according to which society is something that can be beneficially re-formed and rearranged after first being critically analyzed as to its constitutive elements and institutions. At their earliest, utopias were the repository of myths about a world free from the pains of labor and the horrors of war, from greed and often from private property as well. By the time of Plato’s philosophical writings in the 4th century BCE, utopian vision had become at once more modest and more realistic and technical, most prominently in its connection to social engineering. The earliest elements of playful fictionality emerge in the Hellenistic world, which incorporates the theme of travel and the element of the marvelous, often in a satirical vein. The early Christian world tends toward a divide between allegorical abstraction, particularly in elite versions of Christian Neoplatonism, and the more heterodox possibilities of divinely mediated subversion of established social forms and structures in the millenarianism of the lower classes. The Renaissance utopia, finally, emerges after Sir Thomas More’s homonymous text of 1516 as a complex synthesis and mediation between elite and subaltern pursuits, antiquity and modernity, Christian morality and scientific materialism, constituting utopists themselves as mediators and guarantors of social harmony in an otherwise rapidly changing and turbulent world.